Building a Narrative Based Requirements Engineering Mediation Model

Abstract

This paper presents a narrative-based Requirements Engineering (RE) mediation model to help RE practitioners to effectively identify, define, and resolve conflicts of interest, goals, and requirements. With SPI community, there is a common belief that social, human, and organizational issues significantly impact on the effectiveness of the software process improvement in general and requirements engineering process in particularly. Conflicts among different stakeholders are an important human and social issue that needs more research attention in the SPI and RE community. By drawing on the conflict resolution literature and IS literature, we argue that conflict resolution in RE is a mediated process, in which a requirements engineer can act as a mediator among different stakeholders. To address socio-psychological aspect of the conflict in RE and SPI, Winslade and Monk (2000)’s narrative mediation model is introduced, justified, and translated into the context of RE.